VHCS/ispCP vs cPanel

[fale]

Hi,
I've used VHCS for a couple of years, but after I moved to cPanel because VHCS was lacking updates. Now I discover the existence of this project and I'm pretty interested in moving to ispCP.
In the change between VHCS and cPanel, I did noticed a couple of differences.
The first (and cause of all the others, I think) is that VHCS does use virtual users while cPanel uses real linux users.
This creates some differences:
- different folders (/var/www in VHCS and /home in cPanel)
- ssh access (available with - I think - very little code in cPanel, and very secure too)
- user cronjobs are there
- many 'minor' others

Now I'm looking to ispCP and it seems to me that is using the same virtual users idea of VHCS. Is this right?
Which are the advantages of this approach?
It seems to me that all the programs (mail, apache, ...) are already using the cPanel approach by default (or installing a simple module, like mod_userdir)... wouldn't it be easier to implement? wouldn't be more reasonable to split data based on the owner other than based on the kind of data (mail, webpages, ...)?

Thanks for your responses,
Fabio

[ephigenie]

(01-15-2011 09:59 PM)fale Wrote:  Hi,
I've used VHCS for a couple of years, but after I moved to cPanel because VHCS was lacking updates. Now I discover the existence of this project and I'm pretty interested in moving to ispCP.
In the change between VHCS and cPanel, I did noticed a couple of differences.
The first (and cause of all the others, I think) is that VHCS does use virtual users while cPanel uses real linux users.
This creates some differences:
- different folders (/var/www in VHCS and /home in cPanel)
- ssh access (available with - I think - very little code in cPanel, and very secure too)
- user cronjobs are there
- many 'minor' others

Now I'm looking to ispCP and it seems to me that is using the same virtual users idea of VHCS. Is this right?
Which are the advantages of this approach?
It seems to me that all the programs (mail, apache, ...) are already using the cPanel approach by default (or installing a simple module, like mod_userdir)... wouldn't it be easier to implement? wouldn't be more reasonable to split data based on the owner other than based on the kind of data (mail, webpages, ...)?

Thanks for your responses,
Fabio

Hi

in fact of the different users for i.e. apache / fastcgi(suexec) / cgi it is already run with the rights of a local user (the vu2xxx users are real unix users) but they don't have ssh access right now.
Ftp users as well as mail users do have their own rights, because there're more users per domain - so this makes real users overkill and keeps the system a bit more secure in terms of lesser real users to keep track of. FTP users from one domain do have the same uid / gid, but different usernames & passwords.

SSH access wouldn't be too difficult also we still are seeking into the best method of creating chroot directories for each domain.
But there're a lot of different approaches and we still have not chosen the best one yet.
One possible solution - i have in my mind is to create an image which contains a base-chroot filesystem and mount -o bind it to the userdirs (readonly) and put something like unionfs on top of that so that users can actually (over)write things in their chroot environment.
But i didn't have the time yet, to implement this.

If you want - you're invited to help us with this ( the automatic creation of this image is still a problem and some limits in mount bind.

What do you think ?

One other major difference is for sure the "alias" domain thingy - which is an real old thing we still got instead of having equal domains and one userdir.
But this is also already on our todo
(the invitations applies here as well )